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Inactivation of primate superior colliculus impairs covert selection of signals for perceptual judgments

Nature Neuroscience volume 13, pages 261–266 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

Primates base perceptual judgments on some sensory inputs while ignoring others. The covert selection of sensory information for perception is often thought to be accomplished mostly by the cerebral cortex, whereas the overt orienting toward relevant stimuli involves various additional structures such as the superior colliculus, a subcortical region involved in the control of eye movements. Contrary to this view, we show that the superior colliculus is necessary for determining which stimuli will inform perceptual judgments, even in the absence of orienting movements. Reversible inactivation of the superior colliculus in monkeys performing a motion discrimination task caused profound inattention for stimuli in the affected visual field, but only when distracters containing counterinformative signals appeared in the unaffected field. When distracting stimuli contained no information, discrimination performance was largely unaffected. Thus, the superior colliculus is a bottleneck in the covert selection of signals for perceptual judgments.

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Figure 1: Selective attention task design.
Figure 2: Map of inactivation effects.
Figure 3: Sample data from one inactivation session.
Figure 4: Summary results from inactivation sessions in saccade-response version of the task.
Figure 5: Summary results from inactivation sessions in button-press version of the task.
Figure 6: The effects of SC inactivation on local motion discrimination.
Figure 7: Impairments in selective attention after SC inactivation required the presence of a foil signal.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Boehle and N. Dill for technical assistance. This work was supported by the Simons Foundation (R.J.K.), the Institute for Neural Computation (L.P.L.) and an Aginsky Scholars Award (L.P.L.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Systems Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, USA

    Lee P Lovejoy & Richard J Krauzlis

  2. Graduate Program in Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    Lee P Lovejoy

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  1. Lee P Lovejoy
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  2. Richard J Krauzlis
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Contributions

L.P.L. and R.J.K. designed and conducted the experiments and wrote the manuscript. L.P.L. analyzed the data.

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Correspondence to Lee P Lovejoy.

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Lovejoy, L., Krauzlis, R. Inactivation of primate superior colliculus impairs covert selection of signals for perceptual judgments. Nat Neurosci 13, 261–266 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2470

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